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Lets Play / raocow

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WARNING: non-sequitur content ahead
— tagline for his Youtube account

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/raocsmall_5668.png
this is raocow!note 

raocow (real name Samuel Tanguay) is a long-running personality in the Let's Play community, known and loved by many for his Non Sequitur commentary and pleasant-yet-amusing voice. He became a YouTube partner on March 17, 2011.

Also artist and co-creator of Artificial Time XS. His community forum, Talkhaus, created A Super Mario Thing, which raocow also contributed to.

    open/close all folders 

    Games that raocow has LP'd 

A full list can be found here. This youtube account has also created and maintained a list up to Escape Goat.

Provides the page quote for:

Tropes that apply to raocow:

  • Accidental Murder: In the final Rockman 4 Minus Infinity video, he accidentally sucks up Eddie when attempting to suck up some extra lives.
  • AcCENT upon the Wrong SylLABle: He has a surprisingly large English vocabulary, but often pronounces things strangely, due to English not being his first language.
    • He stated that he doesn't mind people correcting his pronunciation, but that sometimes his odd-sounding words are on purpose. In addition, words that have a French origin often confuse him due to his uncertainty of which language's pronunciation to use.
  • The Ace: Chibi-cow can complete levels much faster than raocow, and often flawlessly too.
  • Advancing Wall of Doom:
    • An extremely annoying version can be seen in this VIP 4 video in the Temple of Homing level, where the entire second half the level is trying desperately to outrun a homing missile at top speed, including flight (link to video)
    • The Sawdust level in Mario Gives Up.
  • all lowercase letters: raocow types like this almost exclusively, and has frequently requested his name be spelled with a lowercase r as well.
  • Always a Bigger Fish: Poochy is basically the unreliable steed to Mario's unreliable steed.
  • Alt Text: raocow uses the tags on his videos for basically the same purpose. To quote the tags in this video:
    I tend not to use tags properly instead [I tend to use] them as one of those alternate image tag joke things you see sometimes in webcomics and whatnot
    • This eventually verged into Easter Egg territory when YouTube stopped showing tags on the pages— as of August 2012, they're only visible through reading the site's source code.
  • American Kirby Is Hardcore: Referenced. During his LP of Runman, he notices the still shot of a serious-looking Runman during World 2's intro cutscene. raocow says "that must be American Runman".
  • Amusing Injuries: raocow accidentally fractured his foot when his current LP was VIP 3. He makes fun of it.
  • Angrish: Inverted when he, after numerous attempts, completes level 8-5 of MariAri2. It's complete gibberish to symbolise relief.
    BASHISHUSHAJBUAY! Whew! Which I'm pretty sure is pig latin for bashishushajbuay.
  • Arc Words: While his stream of consciousness commentary style may seem completely random at first, certain words get referenced semi-regularly. raocow himself mentioned he notices he uses the word "laundromat" a lot when he tries to think of a random word.
    • New Jersey and Tim Hortons are referenced a lot as well.
    • And buckets. Lots and lots of buckets.
    • As well as lozenges and McCain.
    • "Mayonnaise!"
    • "Video game!"
    • "Scary like bananas."
    • Juice.
  • The Aristocrats: Invoked after completing a rather arduous desert level in A Super Mario Thing.
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: "It's a little known fact that every single talkhaus member... ooh, little shiny shinies with my fingers!"
  • Ascended Extra: Not with raocow, but with N!SMW2 Yoshi's Island, Lord Puddington was originally just a one-level appearance enemy (Although it did make another appearance in the GBA version) that wasn't necessary for collecting any Red Coins or Flowers.
  • Author Appeal:
  • Bait-and-Switch: Done in this video.
    raocow: Now, I've got a lot of requests here to play as a certain green-hatted dudenote , so... sure, I'll play as Luigi.
    • He's also started doing this with his video title gimmicks. For example, the first video of his Super Mario 64: Last Impact series is titled "wahoo", which would imply that the gimmick is going to be various Mario lines and exclamations. However, "wahoo" is also the name of a type of fish, which turns out to be what the real title gimmick is.
  • Berserk Button:
  • Beware the Silly Ones: He may or may not have punched a swan in the face.
  • Bilingual Bonus: raocow occasionally speaks his native Québécois French, leaving what he's actually saying to whoever else understands the language. Most of the time though, he's just venting his frustrations with the level at hand, incorporating the French cuss words of merde* , tabarnak* , and simonaque* , along with the non-swear exclamation voyons* .
    • On a few occasions, he does translate:
      raocow: Hello. How's it going? Rock'n Nonne. That's the name of Sister Act in [Canadian] French, for some reason.
    • In one video, after realizing that he needs to start the level all over, he spends the last 5 minutes performing the commentary in French. A translation video from a fan exists.
    • In one video, where he finishes a Castle, he proceeds to read the English text as if it were French.
      • Double Entendre: The episode title "La petite Kappa" translates (with some awkward French grammar included) to "The little Kappa", aka Nitori, the main character of the game he was playing. But, seeing how he replaces one word in all the episode titles in Nitroid by "Kappa", one can figure out that the title is actually a reference to the French expression "la petite mort" (little death), which roughly translates to "having an orgasm". Said expression very accurately describes his commentary in that particular episode.
  • Black Comedy: Discussed at the end of his playthrough of Mario Gives Up 2. His consensus is that, while the ending (Mario sending Peach into a lava pit, like in the intro of the first game) would have been funny to him if he were younger, it strikes him as disturbing as an adult.
  • Blatant Lies:
  • "Blind Idiot" Translation: Oyster's translations of the VIP level titles (which were out of context, sans kanji) resulting in, among other things, the memorable "Dodge The Beefsteak."
  • Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
    • "It's a cat! It's a bubble! It's a Bubble-Cat!"
    • "Super giant tumbstones. That are super. And giant! And tumbstones. And probably made of stone."
  • Breather Episode: His Big Fish Legend videos, in which he plays a rather unexciting video game after completing a B-side LP, are intended as this.
  • Breathless Non Sequitur: All the time. Let's just say that if you don't enjoy Non Sequiturs, you won't enjoy raocow. One example from this video:
    "That guy is wearing a helmet, but it doesn't protect him from the dangers of mustard. Probably because mustard is something you eat. I've once received a drop of mustard on my head and I don't think I've suffered a lot of brain damage although, I mean, I could be wrong. I've been wrong about a lot of things in the past such as: Yogurt is not a cat, I had to learn that the hard way, and you can not play the piano if your piano is resting precariously on top of the CN Tower."
    • The title of his channel even says "WARNING: non-sequitur content ahead"
    • From this:
      "I just collide words together and stare at the train wreck."
    • During his playthrough of New! Yoshi's Island, whenever Yoshi is inflicted with a Fuzzy, he rambles about in an even more nonsensical way than usual, if you can believe that!
  • Break the Cutie: Some of his LPs are of games he's actually highly looking forward to, which turn out to be loaded up with Fake Difficulty or poor level design, causing him to become more frustrated or lose interest in the game, which he still tries to complete out of obligation. The biggest example is probably N!SMW2 Yoshi's Island.
    • Happens in a notable scale in episode 38 of YUMP (which, to begin with, sticks out due to the lack of the titling gimmick and the description, which are basically never absent from raocow's videos). The level featured causes raocow to spout more profanities than ever before in any of his videos and to even question the meaning of his entire LP career.
  • Brick Joke:
    • Black Plague, the hilarious True Final Boss of Super Mario Infinity, shows up years later as the (rather weak) True Final Boss of A Super Mario Thing.
    • While playing Mushroom Kingdom Meltdown, raocow spends several minutes on a non sequitur about skeleton growth being the cause of bodily aging, to the point where the skeleton will pop out of the flesh. Weeks later, during Nezumi Man, this happens. He mentioned skeletons pushing on skin several times in the LP; it's one of the few jokes that he repeats. He also makes the reference in his Yoshi's Island hack LP.
    • The legendary ending of SMI2 is not the only time he has faced a time bomb.
    • During The Great Empire, in episode 10, there's a stage called "Boomerang Bro Bonus". It features a single Hammer Bro, rather than a Boomerang Bro. In episode 11, he calls a Hammer Bro's weapon a boomerang.
    • In one episode of Vip 5, raocow goes off in a tangent about a squid that had too much (political) power. In Super Mario World Freedomn, he runs into a giant Blooper, calls him Ikachan (referencing another LP of his), and then says he shouldn't hold that much power.
      • Was subtly referenced in Ikachan's LP itself, which raocow made up a political backstory for. During the Ironhead fight, it was more explicitly mentioned, with raocow asking Ikachan if he knows what he's doing with all that political power.
      • He references this again at the end of New! Super Mario World 2. The game in general gave him a lot of trouble, and the final level was particularly massive and confusing. He ended one video stuck in the middle of a long sewer section, and then picked up the start of the next video back in the same sewer saying "No sewer should be able to hold so much power."
    • In Distorted Travesty 2, early on Claire mentions a key boss. Now, where did we hear that before...
    • In Super Talking Time Brothers 2, he pretended to have forgotten Kirby's name, calling him "Zbambabar", among other random words (see Laser-Guided Amnesia in this same page). When playing the prequel, he says that "it's a shame that Zbambabar is not here".
    • In one episode of Notte Luminosa, he jokes that him saying "oh man" actually means "brrr," because he lives in Canada and it is cold. Later, at the end of the episode:
    "Oh man. (beat) I really should close that window."
    • In ASMBXT, the final boss is the Key Boss. The Toads you meet just before the battle are talking about how they finally found a way to beat him once and for all.
    • The cat planet cat gets a cameo in Apocalypse of Foroze.
    • In Mushroom Kingdom Meltdown, raocow says "That was some quality playing, courtesy of raocow and friends. The friends are the many voices just kind of chilling in my head. I don't hear them, but they're there," and then goes off on a tangent about whether that makes him crazier than someone who actually hears voices in his head. Three-and-a-half years later, during an episode of Apocalypse of Foroze, he casually mentions the voices in his head that he can't hear.
    • The Variety of Chance brings us a double brick joke in the same level: raocow is Climbing a Mountain, with the Food Song playing on the background (and with its corresponding skeleton, too)!
    • That Uncle Broadsword and his wacky get-rich-quick schemes.
    • There is a raopoop made from this song! Kirby 3!
    • During his LP of The Invasion 2, he kept insisting that Yoshi isn't in SMBX. In Super Mario Japan ~Truth Story~, when he sees a Yoshi in SMBX for the first time since the advent of LunaDLL, he concludes that it was used to make the Yoshi possible.
    • At one point in his LP of Something, he mentioned a certain hill formation that vaguely resembled something lewd as looking like Alf. In the sequel, he notes that "...there's Alf too," upon seeing a similar looking hill formation.
    • The very first video of All The MegaMen ends with raocow (playing in reverse order of the boss weaknesses) defeating Bomb Man and then pretending to wonder what could defeat a bomb before settling on Cut Man because "Obviously you want to cut the fuse, right?" 538 videos later when raocow is playing Mega Man Powered Up, he discovers that thanks to the changes in boss weaknesses, you do defeat Bomb Man by cutting the fuse (and the entire bomb, for that matter.)
  • Broken Record: Has found himself repeating a phrase over and over again for a good chunk of a video on numerous occasions.
  • Buffy Speak:
    • He is fond of referring to everything as a thing with a thing, and enemies as guys ("Hey there, guy").
    • Justified, as raocow is from Quebec, and French in Quebec has many, many words that mean "thing" with different connotations that don't translate well into English.
      • Particularly arduous levels are especially often referred to as being "a thing."
    • He decided on "Mr. Bean Man" as his name of choice for the Meep enemy in the Commander Keen Let's Play.
  • Butt-Monkey: Yoshi, the green mistake of nature. Except for Yellow Yoshi, whose fart-powers apparently amuse the cow of rao.
  • Canada, Eh?: Along with Psychedelic Eyeball, one of the two big French-Canadian LPers to have come out of Something Awful.
  • Canon Discontinuity:
    • raocow does not make any mistakes. Any mistakes he makes are either "demos" to show off what happens when you DO fail, or experiments done For Science!. When he does make a mistake, he will call a mulligan.
    • "That totally just happened."
  • Catchphrase:
    • "Hey there, everyone, this is raocow..." "That was a demo." "It's pretty great." (sometimes pronounced "S'pretty great") "Oh boogers." "Chipmunk time!" "Panic panic panic." "Not gonna lie." "Like it was no thing." "Science." "Jesus-hell!" "Good times." "This is raocow, see you guys." "Nuts to y'all, y'all!"
    • "Destroy the world!" when something chaotic is going on.
    • "That totally happened." He says this when state-rewinding to avoid a cruel and/or unfair trap.
    • His earliest LPs have "I am not feeling this one." and "That was pointful." He even mentions that he hopes the former doesn't become a catch phrase.
    • "Join me next time, possibly/probably tomorrow..." at the end of his videos.
    • "Isn't that great? Not really."
    • "That's crazy town!"
    • After particularly nonsensical non-sequiturs he says "What am I even saying here?"
    • "That guy, he has opinions."
    • He often describes things as "destroying the world" when said action only involves destroying a small object of little significance.
    • He sometimes calls people "happy Dan"s, including himself.
    • Hitting an enemy while the enemy hits him back is often referred to as "an exchance of services."
    • If raocow dies at one point, more often than not, the video will cut to when he gets back to the point where he died, with him saying "the return of the revenge".
    • There's also the occasional reference to beefsteaks and dodging them (in reference to a particularly nonsensical alternate reading of one of the level names in the VIP series.)
    • "Oh man".
    • As well as repeated mentions of raocow being the greatest video game.
    • "Fart."
    • After making a mistake: "I'm pretty good at video games, by the way."
    • "What's the story, Wishbone?"
    • "I can tell you that, using words of the English language."
    • When responding to text in the game, he says "You don't say".
    • "This is really dumb," usually when he's laughing at an over-the-top gag in a level.
    • He's actually lampshaded all his various catch phrases at one point, saying that he sometimes takes a look at this trope page for examples of things he should be saying less often.
    • Not exactly a phrase, but, after beating Super Meat Boy, he started humming the "Bandage girl is in another castle" jingle every time he makes a dumb mistake or falls for an obvious trap.
    • "He's like 'check it out'!" Especially when playing Kirby's Adventure. Which turns into "Yo, check it!" in other games.
    • "I'm picking up what you're putting down."
    • Sometimes in a sing-songy tone, "hey [there] buddy, how does it go[/do]?", especially in Guacamelee.
    • "I did it, I solved the puzzle." Sometimes becomes "I did it, I solved world hunger."
    • "Sadness abounds."
    • Hollow Knight has "Thank you, Melody" whenever the Carefree Melody charm tanks a hit for him.
    • "My name is Mega Man and I'm here to say..."
    • Some variation of "Video games don't exist", usually when he's in the middle of rambling while trying to steer himself into making an actual point.
  • Character Alignment: Discussed In-Universe. In one video, raocow explains the problem with Alignment Charts and it only having an x and y axis. His idea would be to add a third z axis to it consisting of (citation needed) Polite, Neutral, and Arrogant. raocow gives examples such as you could be Lawful Good but Arrogant or Chaotic Evil but Polite.
  • Character as Himself: raocow is a playable character in A Super Mario Bros X Thing. As if it wasn't meta enough already.
  • Character Development: He overcomes his abject terror of squashing eyeballs during his Drama Mystery playthrough. "That's good, that means I'm growing as a character".
  • Characterization Marches On:
  • Cloudcuckoolander/Talkative Loon:
    • raocow's Let's Plays are filled with some of the most bizarre and surreal commentary one would ever hear. It helps that he's a French-Canadian for whom English is a second language, although he's still rather fluent in English.
    • He periodically speeds-up random bits of footage to squeeze a video in Youtube's 11-minute (or 15-minute as of July 29, 2010) mark. Sometimes the chipmunked footage is no less intelligible than the real-time.
  • Cliffhanger: This video ended right after the game explained to him that the level he was about to play could potentially break the game simply by playing it.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: During his Let's Play of Super Mario Infinity: Mystery of the Magic Wand, he talks about a point in another game he was trying where it becomes a series of "'Fuck you' after 'fuck you' after 'fuck you.'"
  • Comically Missing the Point:
  • Content Warnings: In this episode of MaGLX2, he puts a warning for headphone users. Cue the X-Files theme and the Illuminati confirmed.
  • Continuity Nod:
    • When experiencing a lot of slowdown in the fourth video of his Romancing Mario LP, he says "Hey there, everyone, this is raocow playing Mushroom Kingdom Meltdown." Later in the same video when he got to a section that had a white foreground and white background, he said, "Hey there everyone, this is raocow playing What the Hell."
    • In the third video of Super Talking Time Bros, when entering a room full of ghosts, he went with "Hey there everyone, this is raocow playing Super Marisa World."
    • Episode 16 of Kirby's Dream Land 3 is titled "Heaven is a very... I said enough."
    • In the 20th video of STTB2.5, raocow frees a mole after defeating a farmer, after which it vows to pay him back by ruining his crops, much to raocow's dismay. "I played a video game about this once, and it ended in tragedy..."
    • The last world of MaGLX2 includes several levels made by makers of games he has lped before, such as Distorted Travesty's Dark Yoshi or iguzamini from Super Mario Japan: Truth Story, culminating on an epic level by the creator of cat planet, sylvie.
  • Convection, Schmonvection:
    raocow: The lava might be scary, but it's only like a very hot bubble bath.
    • He more specifically addresses this here.
    • raocow lampshades it again in this video.
      raocow: This is just barely hair-singing me, because you know, lava, normally, like, at this proximity, Demo would be something like evaporated by now, but I mean we're talking about reverse-gravity lava, which has COMPLETELY different physical implications.
  • Cuckoolander Commentator: As mentioned above, his trademark style of commentary.
  • The Cuckoolander Was Right:
  • Cute Kitten: His Let's Play of cat planet! embodies this.
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
    • Invoked in his Kouhai 2 Let's Play, when he notes that playing Super Marisa World's squirrely controls has made it hard to go back to Super Mario World.
    • He discusses it when he goes from Super Mario Bros. X's controls to Super Mario World's slightly looser controls, and the differences cause him to (among other mistakes) die 8 seconds into the first level of the ROM hack Romancing Mario.
  • Deadpan Snarker: mostly in the YouTube comments (as opposed to his usual hyperactive Cloudcuckoolander in the videos, but that has shades of it too).
  • Department of Redundancy Department: As raocow himself put it: "I need to resist the allure of constant repetition."
  • Dissimile: All the time. Just one example:
    raocow [While playing TSRPR]: "A castle without forest is like a dalmatian without a tongue. It has a lot of trouble eating."
    • In the description of this video, it says that his playthrough is an allegory of the effects of smokingnote . At the end it says "The analogy is perhaps flawed."
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: Invoked repeatedly throughout Kirby's Dream Land 3 when a helper character attaches themselves to Kirby.
  • Drunk with Power: The ridiculously powerful and awesome arsenal of Copy Kitty eventually got to raocow's head, making him ham it up even more than usual and eventually even declare himself God.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: His first LP, The Second Reality Project, is downright lifeless. He improves dramatically after that.
    • He was also a little more casual about swearing in English in his very early days.
  • Easter Egg: The video tags after they got removed, since they still can be found in the pages' source codes.
  • Easy-Mode Mockery: Inverted. When he turned the difficulty down for the Climax Boss of Distorted Travesty just to see what the final phases would be like, he stated that the game has become unfair in his favour. Could also be seen as a reversal, as he's essentially mocked the easy mode. Note that the game did proceed to kick his ass anyway for a while.
  • Eloquent in My Native Tongue
  • Epic Fail: In "A Dreamland Castle Ship", a level from the Make a Good Level X contest, he messes up the first jump and dies. Repeatedly.
    • He once bowled a 1. No, that was not a typo.
  • Eskimos Aren't Real: Exaggerated; he often claims that a thing isn't real because he just encountered it in the game.
  • Even the Subtitler Is Stumped: Turn them on and enjoy the insanity.
  • Evil Is Hammy:
    • He noticeably enjoyed playing an Evil Overlord in Psycho Waluigi.
    • Although the main character is not actually evil, raocow's behavior during Copy Kitty suggests this, especially during the extra missions.
  • Excuse Me While I Multitask: Averted - raocow has issues doing two things at once (not including talking). Cue him playing "Multitask" and failing repeatedly.
  • Failed a Spot Check: Happens fairly regularly, justified most of the time as him rambling and not noticing the flying fish that's about to land on him. And then sometimes he fails to spot the difference between foreground water (which Mario can swim in) and background water (which Mario cannot). In any case, he'll just shrug (or laugh) it off.
  • Fair-Weather Mentor: raocow arguably falls into this when he is teaching fellow troper AOD to play Super Mario World for the first time.
  • Fake Difficulty: He sees the wind sections in Hyper V as these.
  • Fantasy Gun Control: Seeing gun-wielding hammer bros. in the 26th video of Apocalypse of Foroze brings this up.
    "Yeah... hammers bros. shouldn't have a gun. It's Ultimate Tank, though... so... I can sorta understand, but I don't know, man. (laughs) Yeah, they're allowed to have tanks and, you know, airships and a navy, but a gun... that's just going too far! It's like giving Sonic the Hedgehog a black persona that is also a gun-haver! That's just going too far, marketing!"
  • Fast-Forward Gag: Chipmunk time.
  • Fauxlosophic Narration:
    • The "story" in the Rise to the Challenge hack.
    • His explanation of Samus Aran's backstory during his play of the Super Metroid Legacy hack...
      "We don't even care about the story, it starts with the same thing. It's about a guy who, y'know, goes to the bathroom and he ends up in an alternate dimension where he's a lady in a space suit."
    • There's also the "story" in Takkoman.
      "I don't know what any of these words mean, by the way, but the world and the sun is approaching. And the sky is falling, and Chicken Little wasn't around to warn us. The result? Slight disaster, but only a little bit. Luckily, we have some form of hero-like critter to help us. It has a smile, and also a pair of eyes, only one of which is available in profile obviously."
  • Flat "What": During the discussions surrounding ASMT, this was raocow's reaction to Rule 34 of his character being made.
  • For Science!: His justification for exploring an area, finding it leads to death, then rewinding.
  • Foreign Cuss Word: "Tabarnak"note , "voyons" note  and "simonak"note  are common, with "merde"note  on occasion.
  • Formula-Breaking Episode:
    • Episode 60 of his An SMWC Production LP abruptly switches to an LP of Santa Mario due to technical difficulties.
    • When he's having trouble with an especially hard game, he'll often randomly switch to playing Voxatron for a day or two.
    • "the guy who quits history", an xtranormal short wherein a panda relates the story of the titular character, who will never affect anyone and will never be affected by anyone.
  • Gainax Ending: His reaction to Variety of Chance's ending sums it up.
    raocow: "with a grin on her face eclair shouted let's do this again next week." Man, they live in like some sort of weirdo municipal hell together...
  • Genki Guy: Pretty much the only time he runs out of energy to commentate is when a level is really hard.
  • Game Mod: raocow plays many Super Mario World mods, which have been a mainstay of his LP ensemble since he began. The members of raocow's community have also designed a mod for him to play titled A Super Mario Thing, complete with tons of Shout Outs to raocow's many Catch Phrases.
    • He's also made his own Kaizo-level romhack appropriately titled What The Hell?
  • Genre Savvy: raocow is very genre savvy when it comes to platform games. He can sniff out a secret exit with almost no hint of its existence, and he even figures out puzzle levels, the bane of most platformers, without too much difficulty, mostly because he's Seen It All by now.
  • Gentle Giant: In his "tagged" video, he says he's 6'5", and in "Opening Pandora's Box," he described himself as "nearly two meters" tall. Both in and out of character, he seems like a friendly, easygoing guy.
  • Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Lampshaded in one of the GMC Jam games that raocow plays. The game ends with the Microsoft Sam-voiced Final Boss helicopter from the creator's previous Jam entry appearing and proclaiming "I AM HERE FOR NO REASON."
  • Glass Cannon: raocow's build in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga is to just pour 95% of the player-chosen stat boosts into Power, leaving him able to deal over 100 damage with Bros Moves by the time the rematch with Popple and Rookie comes around, but going down in only 1-2 hits against any enemy that does any decent amount of damage.
  • A God Am I: In his Copy Kitty Let's Play, raocow gets just a little drunk on power and declares himself the Supreme Being. He then goes on to destroy the world (as usual) and kill Satan.
  • Good Bad Bugs: invoked In Super Mario Infinity, he likes the glitched "Course clear" screen that reads "Course cleior."
  • Good Bad Translation: invoked raocow gets a big kick out of the strangely-translated Portuguese of Drama Mistery, including a sign that reads "OK SON, YOU ARE DOING THIS WELL" and a character named "JOWEY, the poison cow".
    • When talkhauser Horikawa Otane did a "proper" translation of VIP1 for raocow, she left the level named "Dodge the Beefsteak!" alone because that was just too damn funny. (The actual translation was more along the lines of "Avoid the enemies".)
  • Gratuitous German: This video. It's actually pretty good.
  • Guest Host: When he reaches the tenth place of MAGLX (made by raocow himself), Aterraformer does the playthrough. It's handwaved by him stating that before playing, he does invasive brain surgery on himself in order to forget all about the level, of which the side effects include a change in personality, voice, and name. Later repeated for the second MAGLX but with Isocitration, although without the handwave.
  • Guide Dang It!: This Game Maker game provides very little instruction of any kind. Conequently, raocow has a little trouble figuring it out.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard:
    • Essentially every time he submits a level to a collab hack, just to die hundreds of times in traps of his own design when playing the level on record.
    • Some of the difficult levels in ASMT were of raocow's own design, including the infamous Trial of Iron.
    • Yes, he's the one responsible for this mess. He hides it at first, presumably to receive unbiased feedback from his watchers, but owns up to it at the end of the second video.
    • He also made a level in Super Mario Bros. X, named "murder death place zone". Here it is. You can actually hear him throw his controller across the room.
    • "[This level] was made by me back in the day when I had no idea what 'fun' meant"
  • Horse of a Different Color: Yoshis, which he even calls "horses." Inverted, too: when he comes across an actual horse in one mod (and the same horse in another) he calls it "Mr. Dinosaur."
  • Hot-Blooded: LPing Copy Kitty tends to bring out the Hot-Blooded, Ax-Crazy god of destruction within raocow.
  • Hypocritical Humor: After the name "madcow" appears in Karoshi 2.0's credits, he comments on how silly it is to have the word "cow" in your username.
  • Ice-Cream Koan:
    • raocow would sometimes say seemingly political or controversial sounding phrases in his Lets Plays that might just actually be meaningful and insightful. But if you think of it for a while, you will realize that it's just a plain Non Sequitur.
    • Probably the best example of this.
    • Lampshaded at one point where his nonsequiter about non-self-sufficiency and Fox News ends in him saying "this might be a political message or not, I don't know."
  • Idiosyncratic Episode Naming:
    • Nearly every LP has its own pattern to episode names. See here for more information.
    • One series in which he doesn't, he has for the fourth video's description: "It's hard without a naming gimmick :("
    • Averted with the Earthworm Jim and Super Mario Land 1 Let's Plays, whose episodes' titles are the names of the levels/worlds.
  • I Meant to Do That: "That was a demo."
  • Incredibly Lame Pun: Isn't the Goomba in his SMBX level a-door-able?
    "We got Sonic Heroes music again... Hey there, everyone. This is raocow, we're playing Apocalypse of Foroze. You can tell because it's all FOROZEN OVER! ...Sorry."note 
    • In All the Mega Men 98, he's the one reacting to his own pun. "Oh no, it's Metool Gun! Well, he is gonna be Metool GONE! ...I'm sorry, that was uncalled for."
    • "Hey, clown, why the long face?"
  • Infallible Babble: Discussed early on in the LP of An Untitled Story.
  • Inherently Funny Words: According to raocow, "laundromat". Also "parsimony", "clement," "fart."
  • Insistent Terminology: Super Mario Bros. X is an engine, not a game.
  • Instant Web Hit:
    • It's usually commented that any video uploaded by raocow, or having raocow as one of its tags gets 3,000 to 4,000 views by the end of the day. This includes demos, silly cuts, audiosurf songs, or whatever.
      • Sadly, this has shrunk down to a little less than 1,000, though some series are more popular than that.
    • Almost every comment he posts on YouTube becomes top comment.
  • Internet Mimic: A lot of raocow's fans imitate his idiosyncrasies, catch phrases, and speech patterns on his forums and video comment sections like it was, provorbially, no thing, yo.
  • I Think You Broke Him: Often times when a level is extremely difficult or annoying, raocow would either go crazy or silent. This leads to comments accusing the creator(s) for "breaking raocow".
    • Probably the best example of this is this level. One of the highest rated comments on this video is "raocow broke."
  • Jump Cut: Often used to get him back to where he was before dying, or to remove several failed attempts to get to a place. Often paired with him jump-cutting mid-sentence.
  • Jumping the Shark:invoked Briefly discussed in this video, when he literally jumps on a shark ingame.
  • Kindhearted Cat Lover: Very much so.
    • During his LP of Clarence's Big Chance, raocow outright refused to bring harm to any of the cats in the game, despite them actually hurting you if they made contact. While he accidentally defeated one of them once, he proclaimed "That never happened."
    • Exemplified in this brief, simple, but very moving tribute to his cat who passed away. If you listen closely, you can hear him stifling tears in the background.
    • He practically squees when he encounters a cat in his ASMXBT playthrough.
      • Shortly thereafter, he accidentally hits one with a fireball.
      "NO!!! I'm sorry!"
  • Lampshade Hanging: During his MaGLX2 postgame playthrough:
    "Oh man! It's a modified Big Boo! I am going to laugh a lot."
  • Late-Arrival Spoiler: SMWCP's level Rupture in Reality was made by raocow, although he tried to hide that when he played his own level.
  • Large Ham:
  • Larynx Dissonance: While voicing many female characters ingame, he usually has a varying level of result, but his voice for Marisa Kirisame is just bizarre....
  • Laser-Guided Amnesia: Invoked(?) in this video, where he seems to have forgotten Kirby's name.
    raocow: Your name is not Yoshi. What's your name again? Pizza? Zbambabar?
  • Laser-Guided Karma: This is what happens when he picks on someone for being small.
  • Laughing Mad: Happens very often. Just look at the Funny Moments page and count how many of the linked videos consist of him descending into uncontrollable laughter.
  • Lawful Stupid: In his Newgrounds Roulette, he made up some rules for himself: He'd pick one game from Newgrounds' daily top 5 each day to LP, "game" meaning anything with even the slightest bit of interactivity. This resulted in him LPing a small animation collab simply because you could choose which animation you want to watch.
    This is not so much a playthrough of a game, but a demonstration of how stubborn I am about make-belief and arbritary rules that I give myself for projects.
  • Law of Conservation of Detail :
    • Due to the way he cuts his videos, you know that if a reattempt of a level is shown at normal speed, or from the beginning of a section he would normally jump-cut, he will succeed during that attempt, or at least something interesting is going to happen.
    • The same is true of chipmunk runs, at least on newer episodes — they almost never feature a death.
  • Leeroy Jenkins: He prioritises fun over everything else, and rarely takes his time to plan ahead until a game inevitably breaks his face for the effort. While it's usually entertaining to watch him just enjoy playing a game, it often causes him to not notice foreshadowing, hints, or helpful objects which would have spared him a lot of grief if he just took some time to think ahead.
  • Lethal Joke Character: Any enemy that was meant to be point fodder in the original Super Mario World gave raocow lots of trouble during his ascetic run.note  One enemy in particular - the suicidal koopa of Vanilla Dome 3 - gave raocow lots of strife as he tried to avoid it. This koopa' lack of self-preservation instinct seems to be unintentional though - it behaves more reasonable in the GBA version.
  • Let's Mock the Monsters: He finds nearly all the enemies in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, as well as the game as a whole, to be hilariously goofy.
  • Long-Runners: If you count All The Megamen as a single LP (it's certainly numbered that way,) it's his longest LP by far, spanning 631 episodes over nearly two years.
  • Logic Bomb: In "Mushroom Kingdom Meltdown" he claims he has voices in his head, but can't hear them.
  • Mad Libs Catch Phrase:
    • "Scary like X (Bananas usually)"
    • Before starting levels, he often says, "We're gonna [part of the level name] it up."
    • "Nuts to you, X!"
    • "There's an X there and his name is Y."
    • Mentions of various people eating their weight in X.
    • When an enemy starts behaving strangely, raocow comments that "That (enemy name) doesn't know what the hell."
    • As of late 2012/early 2013, he's taking to adding the suffix "-on" to random words.
    • "Hey there ___, how's it going?"
    • Many of his non-sequiturs describe something as "My favorite [random object, usually some type of food product]." For example, he's described things in the game as "My favorite sports drink" or "My favorite breakfast cereal if I were missing teeth."
    • When encountering a boss: "IIIIIT'S [NAME OF BOSS]!"
    • "Hey there guy, it's ___ planet!"
  • Madness Mantra:
    • CATPLANETCATPLANETCATPLANETCATPLANETCATPLANETCATPLANETCATPLANETCATPLANETCAT!
    • Yellow hurts!
    • In MAGLX3, judge Rameau's Nephew turns raocow's catchphrase "my name is Mega Man and I'm here to say" into this in his review of a boss level featuring Mega Man, by just repeating that same sentence a dozen times as his entire commentary. He rates the level 3/30.
      raocow: Oh man, I left a cultural impact! I think this means Rameau didn't enjoy his stay at the Mega Man State Farm.
  • Major General Song: A fan-made one.
  • Meaningless Lives: Double Subverted. In VIP5, he dies a ridiculous amount and still has plenty of lives. Then, in the level THE GREED, he loses almost all of them... and immediately goes grinding.
    • There are quite a few hacks he's played with a location that pretty much doles out free lives. Or at least has a vine next to a Bullet Bill generator so he can exploit a bug to farm for lives.
  • Milkman Conspiracy
    raocow: [while playing An Untitled Story] You can't destroy the Milkman!......don't tell that to Kiwis, cause it might get infected. INFECTED WITH THE TRUTH!
  • Mind Screw: THE PURPLE HORSE!
  • Mood Whiplash:
    • Happens at the end of episode 11 of Hina's Fluffy Dream, upon reaching the final world.
    raocow: [after a 58-second Beat] ... Guys... I think Hina's in a coma.
  • The Most Dangerous Video Game: His real-lifecore "playthrough" of Super Mario Bros Crossover. After he dies early on into the second level, what follows is a whole minute of nothing. Because, you know, he's dead* .
  • Motor Mouth: He isn't usually spectacularly fast, but the way he rambles on without pause, or concern for the topic he was speaking on four words ago, inspires awe in all but the most jaded of viewers. Apparently (and fortunately for people trying to talk to him) this is something he does semi-on-purpose, and having an actual conversation with him brings a much more normal speech pattern.
  • Musical Episode: He routinely sings his commentary to the tune of the level music.
  • My Future Self and Me: Sort of: in some of his Hyper V videos, he's been adding post-commentary in the sections where his live self (or Livecow as he calls him) gets quiet from frustration. This sometimes leads to him talking over himself, and he's even told his past self to shut up at points, making his videos even more surreal than they already are.
  • My God, What Have I Done?: Happens in his Hollow Knight playthrough when he uses the Dream Nail on Marissa without thinking of it, despite knowing full well it'll render her Deader than Dead. He spends the rest of the video awkwardly regretting his action.
  • My Name Is Not Shazam: Subverted in the Castlevania Romania segment of Zoda's Revenge. He calls a certain enemy type "Frankensteins", but eventually mentions that they're actually based on Frankenstein's Monster, whose name is "Adam".
  • Mythology Gag: Solving the naming formula for the final episode proper of Gato Roboto yields cat planet, one of the Let's Plays commonly associated with raocow.
  • New Powers as the Plot Demands: raocow learns how to cast different spells during the fight against the first boss of Valdis Story: Abyssal City. Deconstructed, however, when this new ability confuses him to the point of nearly losing the fight.
  • Nightmare Retardant: Invoked. It's surreal just how his reactions and mannerisms can turn what's supposed to be scary or depressing into something that Crosses the Line Twice.
  • "No. Just… No" Reaction: After realizing that he hadn't 100-percented the revised New! Super Mario 2 Yoshi's Island level 2-E, which featured a near level-long, life-or-death !-switch run, was loaded with obstacles and allowed absolutely no room for error:
    No.
  • Oh, Crap!:
  • Omnicidal Maniac: He lapses into this quite often during his LP of Copy Kitty. It reaches its peak here.
  • Once an Episode:
    • Starting somewhere in the summer of 2012, punctuating dumb mistakes with the phrase "I'm pretty good at playing video games, just in case you didn't know" and an exasperated cry of "Video games!" became this.
    • After someone complained about this in the comments, raocow going out of his way to find other words to illustrate his incompetence became a Running Gag.
    • Though he sometimes mangles it, he tries to say "Hey there everyone, this is raocow" and "Next time X" in every episode.
  • O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The only time raocow will ever actually stop talking is after he dies/fails a difficult section multiple times in a row. He'll often show cuts from his series of failed attempts (often accompanied with an exclamation of surprise and annoyance) and then put in the full, successful attempt that gets him through the section. These are performed in almost total silence and are very jarring to viewers who are used to the normally extremely loquacious cow.
  • Orphaned Punchline: A lot of his quotes can seem like this, but they're usually non-sequiturs. This actually happens occasionally when he stops fastforwarding midsentence.
    raocow: ...and I am not a time-ologist, unfortunately.
    • Also occasionally happens due to jump cuts.
    raocow: ...twenty-five days to write non-stop.
  • Overcrank: Usually when dying yet again, often right in the middle of a chipmunk segment. Or when he kills a boss. Termed "Walrus time" by the fans, unless he's using it to cover a sneeze. Then, it's a visit from raolion.
    • Lately, he's prone to doing this for clips showing parts of secondary goals (dragon coins, or "get all the red coins" secrets).
    • Zig-Zagged when he replayed levels for 100% completion in Yoshi's Island: Forlorn Lands. Most of the level is in chipmunk mode, but the video slows down to normal speed when he collects a red coin, and slows even further down to walrus mode when collecting a flower.
  • Overly-Long Gag:
  • Overused Running Gag:
    • Lampshaded here when raocow goes farming lives off a bullet bill cannon for at least the 6th time.
    raocow: Yeah, this part has stopped being funny by now.
  • Padding:invoked
    • If a video ends up extremely short on content (like not even coming close to 10 minutes) he'll often play a few Voxatron levels at the end.
    raocow: PADDING VIA VOXATRON!
    • He also used PPR once for this.
    PPR: I figured I'd do this this way instead of ye olde fast-forwarde because I wanted the video to be longer than 8 minutes. I'm all manipulative like that.
  • Perfectly Cromulent Word: raocow actually drops the trope naming word here.
  • Pet-Peeve Trope:
  • Platform Hell: raocow has played through some of them. The Kouhai series are a good example.
    • This one level has the gimmick of killing you if you score any points or collect any coins. Everything in Super Mario World gives you points, and coins are plenty as well. raocow's reaction is in the link.
    • His own romhack, What the Hell, also falls under this a good deal, especially since most of the enemies are invincible.
  • Player Tic:
    • He always jumps through the Yoshi's Island goal rings backwards.
    • He'd also occasionally make Mario dance by rapidly hitting the D-Pad buttons.
  • Porky Pig Pronunciation: Played for Laughs. He has a bit of trouble pronouncing the name Hotel Kamishirasawa, so he opts for "Hotel Mario" instead.
  • Precision F-Strike:
  • Previously on…: This video. Before he starts playing, he shows the footage from the Cliffhanger example on this page again.
  • Protagonist-Centered Morality: raocow frequently hangs a lampshade on this trope, especially when it comes to Mario.
  • Rage Quit:
    • This infamous video (Of an episode of him playing "Cave of Elements"). Only level in that game where he got extremely frustrated playing through.
    • WARNING: If you REALLY want something depressing, just go to 17:52 (And it goes downhill from there). Not a pretty sight. And the ending's quite miserable too. At least in the next episode he's quite cheerful compared to frustrated. He even says that it's one of the only few levels that he has ever ragequitted.
    • It is mentioned that he did it with Acid Labs Inc. from Mario Gives Up 2. He just straight up deleted the footage and just played the level all over again.
    • The final level of Marisa & Alice was so unforgiving that it caused raocow to give up on the game entirely, going so far as to dump the game folder into his Recycle Bin and and empty it on camera.
    • In the extremely unfair hack "S. Mario" ("S" as in "sadistic"), raocow has had to "Rage Quit" a couple of times. Although one of the levels wasn't implied, he showed a video of one of his "scrapped takes" and it actually isn't too bad.
    • Particularly unfair levels get the "OH NO the game just crashed!" treatment:
    • Stalagmite Ruins in Distorted Travesty made him decide to take a hiatus from that game, at least until he was done with N!SMW2.
    • Bugs introduced by the compiler of Tower Of Biased 2 caused raocow to give up on two levels. On one, hitting the midpoint did absolutely nothing, and the other, on several occasions, actually crashed.
    • He gave up on one level in A Super Mario Brothers X Thing as the result of a Game-Breaking Bug that resulted in it having No Ending. After spending four hours and over 200 lives even getting to that point.
    • While not quite a Rage Quit (though there was plenty of raging beforehand,) raocow did eventually decide to give up on trying to complete the Pantheon of Hallownest in Hollow Knight after several videos in a row with little to no progress, deciding that it wouldn't be fair to make viewers sit through his failures any more and that continuing to force it might ruin his positive experience with the rest of the game.
  • Reading the Stage Directions Out Loud: raocow has taken to reading the musical notes/stars/etc. that pop up in Marisa's dialogue in Mari Ari 2 out-loud.
  • Recycled INSPACE: His reaction to the Space Tanks (BONUS 4) level in Mario Gives Up.
  • Rhymes on a Dime: His commentary frequently slips into this.
  • Rule of Funny: According to the commentary in this video, he usually went into chipmunk time only if he didn't think the commentary was interesting enough to warrant splitting into two videos. With YouTube no longer having a time limit, he still chipmunks just because it's one of his trademarks, and has even lampshaded it at least once.
  • Rule of Three: In this video, raocow insists on saying the word "mayonnaise" a total of three times throughout the entire video. And in doing so, he inadvertently saves Tokyo from a giant butterfly monster.
  • Running Gag:
    • Insisting that the Toad House slot machine game in Super Mario Bros. 3 is impossible, even when he's winning at it.
    • Insisting that Yoshi isn't in The Invasion 2, immediately dropping him down a hole whenever he appears. He's eventually forced to admit that Yoshi may, in fact, be in the game.
    • During his playthrough of the GMC Jam #5 entries, the references to the theme of the contest ('facade') were occasionally so blatant that raocow sometimes just replaced random words with 'facade' when reading any text the games provided.
    • "I FOUND A HEART!!" occasionally returns in other Metroidvania LPs, such as Distorted Travesty.
    • raocow arguing with the end-of-level horn in Super Talking Time Bros. 2.
    • raocow causing game designers to patch their games when he LPs them.
    • Finding little graphical slip-ups (usually cut-off graphics without an edge) and stating that the game will never be accepted in Super Mario World Central (usually when the game isn't even a romhack, and sometimes when he downloaded the game from Super Mario World Central).
    • Any modifications to the Big Boo sprite in Super Mario World romhacks are liable to make raocow burst into uncontrollable laughter. Black Plague is probably the most famous example of this.
    • Accidental examples: Dying at the end of the stage is very, very common. It's pretty cliche at this point.
    • In his Castlevania: Symphony of the Night videos, he is utterly unable to find any save points after the 5-minute mark. Then the next day he finds about three or four save rooms in places he overlooked the previous day or just in the room right after the one where he gave up searching the previous day.
    • Subverted in his LP of StarTropics. Upon encountering a But Thou Must! point in a dialogue tree in the first episode, he initially tried to refuse a few times, each time saying 'Hell no! Ahaha,' before ultimately relenting; seemingly setting a precedent for future instances. He quickly decided to drop this, however.
    • All the thumbnails of his Escape Goat videos use a frame showing either the message "Dead" or "Magic Hat Obtained" (except Episode 8, but we pretend it doesn't exist).
    • Every Patreon video of his has several comments made by "a powerful wizard" (or just one wizard with several sockpuppet accounts). Sometimes they ask him wizard questions.
    • His Abducted Toad videos tend to have either a Wario Face or "Try Again" screen as thumbanils. He lampshades it in episode 8 (despite it having neither).
    • His intros for his Wario Land 4 videos has him state the game is "for the [classic game system other than the Game Boy Advance]". The gag ends in the finale, in which he indeed says it's for the Game Boy Advance.
    • Claiming that a Mega Man game is over after beating all the initial stages.
    • A number of Big Fish Legend videos begin with some variation of "A rat and a cat, best friends? I can't believe it." raocow also regularly puts on an air of excessive fake hype for the game, as well as spouting off random cat trivia.
    • In Hollow Knight, he almost always thanks Carefree Melody whenever it saves him from taking a hit. Reappears in Paper Mario with a similar mechanic.
    • In Shadow the Hedgehog, he screams "I'M SO MAD" every time Shadow fills his overlimit gauge and enters Chaos mode.
    • His love of using Bombette from Paper Mario at the expense of every other party member. Also his refusal to upgrade HP when levelling up until the game literally forces him to by capping BP.
  • Sanity Slippage: Inverted. When especially difficult levels start to grind away at him, raocow's Breathless Non Sequiturs begin to dry up and he sounds increasingly... normal. Can be rather unnerving when compared to his usual demeanor.
  • Save Scumming: Averted in later videos, but played straight in most of raocow's earlier videos. For hard hacks like the VIP series, Kouhai, and others, he would use save states all the time, but he later stopped doing that except for the occasional science moment, unless the levels were really unfair.
  • The Scrappy: This is raocow's opinion of Yoshi the stupid freakin' horse.
    • He expresses a particular distaste for Issun's character in his playthrough of Ōkami, for his constantly chiming in with redundant commentary that doesn't add anything, and the inappropriate remarks he insists on making about the female characters encountered throughout the game.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: In-Universe: raocow really does not like wind or homing Bullet Bills.
  • "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny: Discussed (though he calls it "getting Citizen Kane'd") while playing Half-Life 2, where he acknowledges that sequences he considers shooter cliches were much more innovative when the game came out and only became cliches in the 16 years between the game's release and his playthrough. invoked
  • Self-Deprecation:
  • Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Sensory Abuse: Several "bad" entries in the contests he plays end up doing this.
    • Aural Invasion: This ironically bad hack in the 2010 vanilla contest had horribly corrupted music, which he commented on repeatedly.
    • Visual Assault: This level, Pink Zone, made for the Talkhaus's Make A Good Level 2 contest is... very pink. It's a Take That! to raocow's What The Hell? which he partially realizes.
  • Serious Business: raocow has repeatedly said that he thinks most Let's Players ignore the "let's" part of the aspect. Among other things, this means he insists on keeping the comments open even when people are spamming him with help.
  • Shaped Like Itself:
  • Shout-Out: All the time.
  • Signature Laugh: His distinct "UAH HA HA HAHAHA"
  • Sincerity Mode: Sometimes, raocow has to point out that he's actually trying to tell the audience something rather than rambling about stuff as usual.
  • Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: Ultimately subverted, when he's eventually forced to admit that Yoshi is, in fact, in SMBX.
  • Slash Fic: raocow's forums even have its own thread for it. He's stated that he's not even gonna go near it.
  • Soul Jar: In one level, Mario can't let anything touch a skull shaped object, otherwise he gets killed.
    raocow: Freaking hell, Mario, why did you have a horcrux placed in such an unusual place?
  • Spoonerism: He is prone to saying "Darshgorn it!".
  • Spoof Aesop: Way too many.
  • Stealth Pun: In Mario Gives Up part 4...
    "Oh, there's drills there, you don't want to get drilled to death... It's almost as bad as being bored to death, you could say."
  • Strictly Formula: His Takkoman LPs are kind of similar. Eventually lampshaded at the beginning of episode 8.
    "My prediction for this video goes thusly: I'm going to enter a level and I'm going to finish the level itself in roughly three minutes or so. I'm not going to say a whole lot of thing that relate to much of anything, I'm just gonna smash my face through everything, not pointing out much unless there's a new enemy or Nue's there for some reason. Otherwise I might, you know, share a comment with, if there's a mid-boss. I might die at the midboss or I might not. Once I get to the boss, I'm gonna try two or three lives to do it legit, unless, you know, until I get kind of tired and basically tank every hit and win by kick spamming. Of course this is assuming it's a Megaman-type boss and not a gimmick."note 
  • Sturgeon's Law: Mentioned by name in this video, mentioning that most Newgrounds games are utterly terrible. Exaggerated when he says that the good is only a small percent of a small percent, rather than the usual ten percent.
  • Stylistic Suck: His... "webcomic", Exupéry, adventures of.
  • Surprisingly Good English: English is raocow's second language and he's noted to speak English pretty much only for his Let's Plays, yet his vocabulary is surprisingly diverse. Given, he flubs words occasionally but on the whole it's quite good.
    • In a YT comment, he stated that his father being in the military caused him to move around a lot; he apparently mostly went to French-speaking schools, but spoke English in the neighborhoods he lived in. He says this is probably why his accent isn't really all that "French Canadian"-ish.
  • Surreal Humour: His trademark.
  • Sympathy for the Devil: He feels bad for killing Bounce Man because he acted like a naïve child who wasn't even aware that what he was doing was evil.
  • Take a Third Option: In Façade, when Grace asks him whether or not what he's said so far is supposed to mean something, he replies "yneos".
  • Take That!:
    • In the intro of Mega Man: A Day in the Limelight 2:
      Game Intro: DR WILY HAS UNLEASHED A SUPER VIRUS THAT HAS INFECTED ALMOST ALL ROBOTS ON EARTH CAUSING THEM TO DESTROY ALL THEY SEE.
      raocow: Oh no, SUPER virus?! Not Roboenza! That's a TERRIBLE idea for a plot!
    • Intentional or not, he seems to have a habit of taking lighthearted jabs at the US during his rambling.
    • Also one here where he takes a jab at people who think it's always the game's fault they lose.
    • In a Super Talking Time Bros 2.5 playthrough, there's a level with a similar name to Are You Afraid of the Dark?. raocow then says that it's the same name as "a stupid show".
  • Take That, Audience!: At the start of this episode, he calls all of his fans a literal butt.
  • Talkative Loon: His other trademark. In all of his videos, nary even a second goes by without him saying something.
  • Tempting Fate:
  • That Came Out Wrong:
    • While normally quite good at averting this, his Breathless Non Sequiturs and his tendency to interrupt them upon taking damage in a game inevitably results in this trope.
    raocow: "There's a thing that you put in your mouth and you-" [gets hit] "-chew real loud and the guy says OW." [Beat] "Uh, I can't believe I said that... uh, let's... let's hope no one understands that part."
  • That Didn't Happen: Done by him the first time he sees a Yoshi in Super Mario Bros. X. He immediately tells the Yoshi that it's not in the game. And then he throws it off the bottom of the screen.
  • That One Level: invoked He'll run into one on occasion. Called out by name in this video, titled "that one level video". The level in question was incredibly difficult for its place in the game and took raocow nearly two hours to finish. Not helping was the fact that the midpoint was at the very end in anticipation of a boss that was never implemented.
  • This Is Gonna Suck:
  • Three Lines, Some Waiting: He tries to make two videos per day, one game for each, but then there are times where he's playing more games than that. Add in some intermission videos, and this trope comes into effect.
    • Case in point: he has been uploading his Big Fish Legend playthrough whenever he ends one of his B-side projects, but only one video at a time. Then the day after he starts a new B-side and Big Fish Legend goes back right into the fridge. He started the series on August 1st 2015, and it may very well be his longest project -measured by days- up to date (unless you count All The Megamen as a single LP.)
  • Throw The Stupid Horse A Bone: raocow has insulted Yoshi many, many times (see The Scrappy above), including calling him a "green miscreant" and "an insult to all creation". In this video, after Yoshi looks like he's going to fall off a ledge, then doesn't, allowing raocow to get back on him, he says:
    "Thanks for not plunging in that hole there Yoshi. I appreciate it. I-I usually I don't appreciate you enough, perhaps, some people would argue."
  • Title Drop: Invoked multiple times in the Façade video.
  • Undercrank: Chipmunk mode. He's even done two videos entirely in chipmunk mode.
    • Inverted in one video where a YouTube glitch causes the audio to go into half-speed before slowly cranking back up to normal, albeit about 2 seconds out of sync. Then back into chipmunk time. It's like YouTube found the one way to make raocow more surreal.
    • Chipmunk mode has since been renamed "Chibicow".
  • The Unpronounceable: One of the many Super Mario World hacks he played was titled :P :P :P. When he had to refer to the game's title, he usually either said "P P P" or blew three raspberries.
  • Two Lines, No Waiting: There are currently 3 LPs that are uploaded every day, each with their own rules as to what goes in each one:
    • The A-Side, which is raocow's personal choice, usually consisting of Mario ROM hacks and fangames, though occasionally something like the Donkey Kong Country trilogy or Copy Kitty will end up there as well.
    • The B-Side, which is voted on by members of raocow's Patreon (called the "Patapon") and typically consists of indie games on Steam.
    • The C-Side, originally "All the MegaMen", where raocow played through every Mega Man platformer and devoted at least one video to every side game he was able to get his hands on* . Currently it's "All the Sonics", where raocow plays every game in the series (side games includes) in order of release.
  • Unusual Euphemism:
    • "Go eat a ham."
    • He uses "Pumpernickels!" as a swear word occasionally.
  • Verbal Tic: Try listening to see how many times raocow says "It's pretty great" or "oh man".
  • Vocal Dissonance: His voices for Marisa and Mario. Marisa's is quite deep, makes his throat hurt, and is the exact same voice he uses for Bowser, and Mario's is his attempt at reading 'normal' dialogue with Mario's canon Super Mario 64 voice.
  • Vocal Evolution: His voice was a lot softer, calmer and more thickly-accented at first. As he refined his Talkative Loon nature, he also developed a "wackier" tone of voice to match, while becoming more fluent in English. Even his out-of-character videos sound nothing like he did on his first LP.
  • Voice Clip Song:
  • Wham Episode: At the end of Vip 5 episode 48, raocow game overs on a postgame level and is sent all the way back to right before Bowser's Castle, which took six episodes to complete. By the next episode, though, he's mysteriously total-cleared the level. It's still quite shocking when it happens, though.
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not Didactic?: Mercilessly parodied on multiple occasions. invoked
  • Who Dares?: to try to stop the time bomb?
  • Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: As the result of being witness to a horrific motorcycle accident in his youth (in which the motorcyclist's face had been cut open), raocow has a significant aversion to depictions of facial injuries, and to bones. With that said, in his playthrough of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, he found the design of the majority of the skeletal enemies there to be too goofy to 'trigger' him (though the bovine Stone Skulls nevertheless struck him as being a little too realistic for comfort).
  • With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Seems to be the case in his Copy Kitty playthrough, although it's played for laughs. His video titles for the series even seem to reflect this.
    raocow: I assume this is how the world works when you're also, you know, slightly FILLED WITH INSANITY! *evil laugh* The world is a Cloyster of love! Yes! Fill the world with the confettis of my soul!
  • Womb Level: Posits that Circuit Man's level in Mega Man Rock Force must be this for Mega Man with all its circuitry and computer parts.
  • Word-Salad Humor: Just about everything out of his mouth will quickly twist its way into this.
  • Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: Sometimes he precedes a random noun with "ye olde"note  and adds an e at the end of it, resulting in phrases like "ye olde P-switche".
  • You No Take Candle: Intentionally mangles English; he's more or less fluent in both English and French. With that said, on occasion some of his structures sound odd, but he'll often comment on how bizarre they sound immediately.
  • Zen Survivor: PPR (Post-Production raocow).

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